valuable articles of apparatus--as the rack-bars and the series
of rings--which have hardly made their appearance, as yet, in
Massachusetts, though considered indispensable in New York.

Gymnastic exercises are as yet but very sparingly introduced into our
seminaries, primary or professional, though a great change is already
beginning. Frederick the Great complained of the whole Prussian
school-system of his day, because it assumed that men were originally
created for students and clerks, whereas his Majesty argued that the
very shape of the human body rather proved them to be meant by Nature
for postilions. Until lately all our educational plans have assumed man
to be a merely sedentary being; we have employed teachers of music and
drawing to go from school to school to teach those elegant arts, but
have had none to teach the art of health. Accordingly, the pupils have
exhibited more complex curves in their spines than they could possibly
portray on the blackboard, and acquired such discords in their nervous
systems as would have utterly disgraced their singing. It is something
to have got beyond the period when active sports were actually
prohibited. I remember when there was but one boat owned by a Cambridge
student,--the owner was the first of his class, by the way, to get his
name into capitals in the "Triennial Catalogue" afterwards,--and that
boat was soon reported to have been suppressed by the Faculty, on the
plea that there was a college law against a student's keeping domestic
animals, and a boat was a domestic animal within the meaning of the
statute. Manual labor was thought less reprehensible; but schools on
this basis have never yet proved satisfactory, because either the hands
or the brains have always come off second-best from the effort to
combine: it is a law of Nature, that after a hard day's work one does
not need more work, but play. But in many of the German common-schools
one or two hours are given daily to gymnastic exercises with apparatus,